The seventeenth century presents an intriguing paradox. The dominant image of France's canonized classical age is the all-powerful monarch Louis XIV (ruled 1661–1715), a man who reduced the nobility to puppets and harnessed every discourse – literary, historical, philosophical – to pull his own chariot modelled on Apollo's. This would hardly seem to be a fertile milieu for female creativity. And yet seventeenth-century France witnessed a veritable explosion of women's participation in the literary and intellectual realm. During the years 1640–1715 alone, there were over 220 women who actively participated in the literary scene. They shaped that scene in an unprecedented fashion, and their innovations as both producers and consumers had a profound and long-lasting influence on the French literary tradition.

To what can this seemingly sudden upsurge in women's participation in the literary field be attributed? While the sixteenth century had its literary luminaries, there was not a strong female literary tradition upon which seventeenth-century followers could draw, as would be the case for the eighteenth century. There is no single explanation for this seventeenth-century phenomenon; rather one must speak of a confluence of historical and intellectual factors that together produced the powerful female literary tradition of this period.

In terms of history, sixteenth-century France did leave a legacy of strong female actors on the political stage.